"Our military first policy calls for an eye for an
eye, a tooth for a tooth, retaliation for retaliation,
ultra-hardline for hardline, war for war, total war for
total war, nuclear war for nuclear war."-
Kim Jong-il

TOKYO - A little-noted fact about the second nuclear
test conducted on May 25 by the Kim Jong-il
administration of the Democratic People's Republic of
Korea (DPRK) is that it was a highly successful fission
trigger test for multi-megaton warheads.

These types of warheads can be detonated in outer
space, far above the United States, evaporating its key
targets. This is a significant indication of the
supreme leader's game plan for nuclear war with the
crippled superpower and its allies, Japan and South
Korea.

The North Korean Foreign Ministry on April 29 announced
its plan to test-fire what it termed a long-awaited
"intercontinental ballistic missile" (ICBM), the first
public ICBM test after numerous missile tests,
short-range, medium-range, and long-range, were
conducted without notice.

On March 9, the General Staff of the nuclear-armed
Korean People's Army had begun preparing to launch
simultaneous retaliatory strikes on the US, Japan and
South Korea in response to their act of war.

Although no appropriate test site for a thermonuclear
bomb is available on the Korean Peninsula, North Korean
scientists and engineers are confident, as a series of
computer simulations have proved that their hydrogen
bombs will be operational. The North Korean message is
that any soft spots of the US, Japan and South Korea's
defense lines will be used as the testing grounds for
their thermonuclear weapons.

The Korean Central News Agency said on May 25 that the
underground nuclear test was carried out at the request
of nuclear scientists and engineers and reported:

The current nuclear test was safely conducted on a
new higher level in terms of its explosive power and
technology of its control and the results of the test
helped satisfactorily settle the scientific and
technological problems arising in further increasing
the power of nuclear weapons and steadily developing
nuclear technology.

John Pike, the founder and director of
globalsecurity.org, told the Weekly Standard on October
19, 2006, that the North Korean nuclear test that year
may have been a test of a "trigger device" for a much
larger hydrogen bomb. Writing in the New York Times on
April 7, 2009, he revealed that "North Korea's
low-yield nuclear test in October 2006 did "coincide
with the sub-kiloton tests of the fission trigger for a
hydrogen bomb". He added, "possibly North Korea's
hydrogen bombs can be easily fitted on missiles".

The Kim Jong-il administration has developed its global
nuclear strike capability primarily as a deterrent to
US invasion to keep the Korean Peninsula out of war.
Secondly, it needs operational nuclear missiles
targeted at US and Japanese targets in the event of a
DPRK-US war.

The North Korean state-run newspaper, Minjo Joson,
vowed on June 9 to use nuclear weapons in war as
"merciless means of offense to deal retaliatory
strikes" against anyone who "dares infringe upon the
dignity and sovereignty of the DPRK even a bit".

Scenario for nuclear war
After shifting to a plan B, Supreme Leader Kim Jong-il
has put in place a nuclear game plan as a part of the
plan's military first policy to deal with nuclear rogue
state America and its allies South Korea and Japan.
(See Kim Jong-il
shifts to plan B, Asia Times Online, May
21)

The nuclear game plan is designed firstly to militarily
prevent the US from throwing a monkey wrench into the
plans of the Kim Jong-il administration for economic
prosperity by 2012 - the centenary of the birth of
founding father Kim Il-sung - in a bid to complete its
membership of the three elite clubs of nuclear, space
and economic powers.

Its second aim is to win the hearts and minds of the 70
million Korean people, North, South and abroad, and
leave little doubt in their eyes that Kim Jong-il has
what it takes to neutralize and phase out the American
presence in Korea. This will hasten the divided parts
of ancestral Korean land - bequeathed by Dankun 5,000
years ago and Jumon 2,000 years ago - coming together
under a confederal umbrella as a reunified state.

It is designed to impress upon the Korean population
that Kim Jong-il is a Korean David heroically standing
up to the American Goliath, that he can lead the epic
effort to settle long-smoldering moral scores with the
US over a more than 100-year-old grudge match that
dates as far as the 1905 Taft-Katsura Agreement and the
1866 invasion of Korea by the USS General
Sherman.

Third, Kim Jong-il has described the shift to plan B as
a stern notice for the governments of the US and its
junior allies that they cannot get away with their
hostile behavior any longer, unless they are prepared
to leave their booming economies consumed in a great
conflagration of retaliatory thermonuclear attacks.

The game plan assumes that the US is unlikely to shake
off its aggressive behavior until it is wiped off this
planet. The Barack Obama administration has not taken
much time to reveal its true colors, which are no
different from the George W Bush administration. There
have been four compelling signs:

First, the March 9-20 Key Resolve (Team Spirit) joint
war games between the US and South Korea.

Second, the US-led United Nation Security Council's
(UNSC) condemnation of an innocuous April 5 satellite
launch.

Third, the rehashing of counterfeit money charges that
the US has failed to produce compelling evidence to
support. As Newsweek wrote in its June 8 issue, "The
Treasury Department couldn't find a single shred of
hard evidence pointing to North Korean production of
counterfeit money."

Fourth, the presence of Bush holdovers in the Obama
administration, such as Stuart Levy, the architect of
Bush-era financial sanctions intended to criminalize
the DPRK.

Four types of hydrogen bomb raids
The game plan for nuclear war specifies four types of
thermonuclear assault: (1) the bombing of operating
nuclear power stations; (2) detonations of a hydrogen
bombs in seas off the US, Japan and South Korea; (3)
detonations of H-bombs in space far above their
heartlands; and (4) thermonuclear attacks on their
urban centers.

The first attack involves converting operating nuclear
power plants on the coastline of the three countries
into makeshift multi-megaton H-bombs.

The New York Times on January 24, 1994, quoted Paul
Leventhal, president of the Nuclear Control Institute,
warning that North Korea could easily launch de-facto
hydrogen bomb attacks on South Korea.

"North Korean retaliation to bombing could result in
vastly more fallout in the South than in the North ...
North Korean retaliatory bombing could bring Chernobyls
multiplied."

If bombed, one average operating nuclear power station
is estimated to spew out as much deadly fallout as
150-180 H-bombs. Bombing one nuclear power station
would render the Japanese archipelago and South Korea
uninhabitable. Doing the same to the US may require
bombing one plant on its west coast and another on its
east coast.

Nothing is easier than bombing a power plant on a
coastline. There is no need to use a ballistic missile.
Primitive means will do the job.

The US has 103 operating nuclear power stations with
onsite storage of a huge quantity of spent fuel rods
and Japan has 53 operating atomic power stations. Japan
has a stockpile of weapons-grade plutonium - enough to
assemble more than 1,000 atomic bombs in a short period
of time. South Korea has 20 operating nuclear power
stations with onsite storage of a huge quantity of
spent fuel rods.

The detonation of sea-borne or undersea H-bombs planted
on the three countries' continental shelves will
trigger nuclear tsunamis with devastating
consequences.

A 2006 RAND study of a ship-based 10-kiloton nuclear
blast on the Port of Long Beach had some harrowing
conclusions:

"Within the first 72 hours, the attack would
devastate a vast portion of the Los Angeles
metropolitan area. Because ground-burst explosions
generate particularly large amounts of highly
radioactive debris, fallout from the blast would
cause much of the destruction. In some of the most
dramatic possible outcomes: Sixty thousand people
might die instantly from the blast itself or quickly
thereafter from radiation poisoning.
One hundred and fifty thousand more might be exposed
to hazardous levels of radioactive water and sediment
from the port, requiring emergency medical
treatment.
The blast and subsequent fires might completely
destroy the entire infrastructure and all ships in
the Port of Long Beach and the adjoining Port of Los
Angeles.
Six million people might try to evacuate the Los
Angeles region.
Two to three million people might need relocation
because fallout will have contaminated a
500-square-kilometer area.
Gasoline supplies might run critically short across
the entire region because of the loss of Long Beach's
refineries - responsible for one-third of the gas
west of the Rocky Mountains.
RAND projects that the economic costs would exceed $1
trillion.

The third possible attack, a high-altitude
detonation of hydrogen bombs that would create a
powerful electromagnetic pulse (EMP), would disrupt the
communications and electrical infrastructure of the US,
the whole of Japan, and South Korea.

Many of the essential systems needed to survive war
would be knocked out, as computers are instantly
rendered malfunctioning or unusable. Military and
communications systems such as radars, antennas, and
missiles, government offices, would be put out of use,
as would energy sources such as nuclear power stations
and transport and communications systems including
airports, airplanes, railways, cars and cell
phones.

Ironically the ubiquity of high-tech computing gadgets
in the US, Japan and South Korea has made them most
vulnerable to EMP attacks.

The last and fourth attack would be to order into
action a global nuclear strike force of dozens of
MIRVed ICBMs - each bearing a thermonuclear warhead on
a prefixed target.

The Yongbyon nuclear site has always been a decoy to
attract American attention and bring it into
negotiations on a peace treaty to formally end the
Korean War. Since as far back as the mid-1980, North
Korea has assembled 100-300 nuclear warheads in an
ultra-clandestine nuclear weapons program. The missiles
can be mounted on medium-range missiles designed to be
nuclear capable.

A prototype ICBM was assembled by the end of the 1980s.
Two prototype ICBMs were test-fired on May 29, 1993,
with one splashing down off Honolulu and the other off
Guam. The Kim Jong-il administration gave an advance
notice to the US government of the long-range missile
test. But the American reaction was skeptical.

In April 2001, the Associated Press quoted Navy
representative Mark Kirk's "terrifying encounter in
1993 with what seemed possible nuclear attack" from
North Korea. He recalled:

It was a no notice, no warning missile launch out
of North Korea, and for the first and only time in my
career in the NMJIC [National Military Joint
Intelligence Center], I got to see all of the panoply
of the United States military wake up in a few
seconds.

We did not know what kind of missile it was, so the
impact area, at the beginning, was the entire United
States, and you thought about what we might be doing
in the next 12 minutes: would we be notifying the
president that we had lost an American city? We were
going to know the answer in 12 minutes.

At first it still included the Pacific Coast, then it
included Hawaii.

AP added: "Little was made of the 1993 launch at the
time because it wasn't determined until later that it
likely flew over Japan and landed in the Pacific Ocean,
Kirk said."

It was not until 1998 that the US notified the Japanese
government of the flyover of a North Korean long-range
missile before splashing down off Hawaii. The US
National Aeronautics and Space Administration quietly
labeled the 1998 satellite launch a success.

According to a February 12, 2003, AP report, US
intelligence had concluded a few years earlier that
North Korea has a ballistic missile capable of hitting
the western United States and possibly targets farther
inland.

Kim Myong Chol is author of a number of books
and papers in Korean, Japanese and English on North
Korea, including Kim Jong-il's Strategy for
Reunification. He has a PhD from the Democratic
People's Republic of Korea's Academy of Social Sciences
and is often called an "unofficial" spokesman of Kim
Jong-il and North Korea.